1 Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On

Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen. ‘Seduced by A. Prick, Directed by Ima Cunt, Photographed by R.U. Hard’ The 1927 American stag film Wonders of the Unseen World, whose pruriently succinct credits I have borrowed for my epigraph, got it wrong. In fact Mr. Prick was the real director and Ms. Cunt only the star performer, while Mr. Hard, the state of whose arousal is solicitously queried throughout, was and is the spectator addressed. For it is no secret that there are many more cunts than pricks in front of the camera in this film, and in the American stag cinema in general--that distinctive corpus of approximately 2000 films of a total duration of perhaps 300 hours produced between 1915 and 1968 that is the subject of this essay1. It is equally without question that behind the camera 1This is my conservative estimate of the size of this corpus, extrapolated from the most reliable filmography available, in Di Lauro and Rabkin, 1976. The question arises of course of whether a group of films produced over more than half a century, encompassing both professional studio productions in 35mm and their amateur 8mm descendants, could constitute a “corpus” in any useful sense. However I insist on the coherence of this body of work, despite its obvious evolution over time, for three reasons: the continuity of its thematic and iconographic content, the continuity of its clandestine but commercial status throughout this period, and finally the finality of its termination by the emergence of explicit sexual cinema in the licit public marketplace around 1968. 1 and in the audience there are pricks and only pricks. Not only are most of the anonymous male artists during the heyday of the stag fanatically focused on the female organs, but they also in most cases do everything in their power to avoid showing male organs, to keep those pleated flannel trousers on. There is nothing surprising in this avoidance, for the stag filmmakers who supplied the lively clandestine market of itinerant projectionists and all-male audiences are anticipating that great American pop culture tradition of genital aphasia of the postwar era, shaped by censorship, yes, but also by shame and disavowal. This tradition would reach its zenith in the 1950s with Russ Meyer2 and Playboy, which for the first two decades of its history meticulously banished not only Ima's cunt from its airbrushed photographic iconography, but more significantly all hints of the male body, especially the eyes and penises to which the Bunnies were addressing their ‘R.U. Hard?'s.’ Take Smart Alec (1953), for example, some say the 1953 apogee of the American stag tradition, a film that miraculously does not even acknowledge that the male protagonist (who is lithe, blond and tanned if you really look hard) actually has a penis, and fights as hard to avoid getting it in frame as squeamish leading lady Candy Barr struggles to avoid sucking it. This is what I still remember from my experience thirty years ago on first seeing this film with a rowdy group of college boys who, smothered by Barr's sixteen-year-old mammary amplitude, didn't seem to notice the hero's castration...but that's 2Russ Meyer may well be identified in popular memory with his films of the late1960s, but his first breakthrough hit The Immoral Mr. Teas, appeared in 1959. 2 another story.3 Throughout Strictly Union (1917), the protagonist Mr. Hardpenis may well have had his personal reasons for keeping his voluminous overalls on, but the tenacious drapery of most of his peers, as well as the unceremoniousness of male disrobings when they do happen in the stag film corpus, whether off-screen (e.g. Inspiration [1945]) or via jump cuts (The Hypnotist [1931]; Fishin' [1941]), are part of the consistent pattern of denial. At the same time, the general corpus of the American stag film demonstrates the obsession of patriarchal culture with the elusive Ms. Cunt, with ‘figuring and measuring’ the unknowable ‘truth’ of sex--making the female sex speak, as Linda Williams might put it (Williams, 1989)4--with penetrating women's bodies and their erotic pleasure. But stag films fail remarkably in this endeavour. Playmates (1956-58), in which a lit cylindrical light bulb is inserted in the protagonist's vagina, is both an extremist parody of this desperate search for truth and a demonstration of its futility. However, what these movies ultimately succeed in doing instead is illuminating both the fleshly pricks they try so hard to avoid showing, or show only incidentally, and the symbolic phallus--in short, masculinity. This is my objective in this essay, to demonstrate how the stag films, both on-screen and off-screen, are tenaciously engaged with the homosocial core of masculinity as constructed within American society, inextricably spread out over what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the ‘homosocial continuum.’ (Sedgwick, 1985) 3I tell this story, along with many others, in Waugh, 1996: 2-3. 4 Williams treats classic stag films in Chapter 3 of this definitive monograph on heterosexual film pornography of the seventies and eighties, ‘The Stag Film: Genital Show and Genital Event.’ 3 Only rarely does this question of masculinity erupt explicitly in the stag film corpus. For example, two films draw attention to the pattern elsewhere by their deployment of an exceptional trope: in the remarkably similar denouements of An Author's True Story [1933], and Goodyear5 [1950s], two worldly wise stag heroines pause and diddle thoughtfully with flaccid and spent pricks, shown unusually up close, as if to ask not only ‘R.U. [No Longer] Hard?,’ but also ‘what is this that has caused so much narrative and social commotion?’ The Goodyear performer even shakes her head--sadly? bemusedly?--as she looks at the unprepossessing organ. The cartoon Buried Treasure (1925) is the only other site of what I would call an overt interrogation of masculinity, availing itself exuberantly of the resources of animated metaphor and deconstruction. This nonphotographic [i.e. graphic and iconic, rather than indexical] ‘western’, with its penile swordfights and visual jokes about buggery, crab lice, impotence, castration and prostitution, is the only hint of the problematization of sex that Williams would diagnose in a much later corpus, seventies hardcore, the only anticipation of the screen-size blowups of monstrous detachable pricks in Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) and its ilk. In the corpus of American stags made between 1915 and 1968, there are thus a few moments of explicit reflection among more than three hundred hours of unconscious masculinity on display in spite of itself. I am not denying that some evidence of women's subjectivity also flickers against the grain of the stags. Across the screen divide come occasional glimpses of female subjectivity in different forms: pleasure (the rare unmistakeable female orgasm identified by diarist Glenway Wescott in a 1949 5 Goodyear is unusually prophetic in its focus on condoms, hence the title. 4 stag screening as ‘the female finally lifting in a kind of continuous kiss of the entire body from head to foot,’ [Wescott, 1990: 266]); camaraderie (especially with other women, e.g. nude bathing à trois in Getting His Goat [1923], but also with men, e.g. the extraordinarily congenial and natural conversation the skinny dipper in Fishin' has with her farmboy conquest); generous professionalism (the Nun's [1958] expert fingers irresistibly drawn back to the anus of her humping Fabian-haired lover); distraction (the most important thing the star of Kensey Report [sic, c. 1950] has on her mind at the end of her performance is to frantically brush off her flouncy black New Look cocktail skirt); and, yes, disgust (the buxom blonde with the heap of Betty Grable ringlets grimaces and wipes her face after an unforeseen ejaculation in The Dentist [c.1947]). Admittedly these films were presumably directed by men, and ultimately sutured within the framework of male subjectivity. But the spontaneous “natural” resonance of these gestures I have described, in relation to the self-conscious awkwardness of most of the nonprofessional performances throughout the stag corpus, gives them a behavioural authenticity that stands apart. But these instances, notwithstanding a certain revisionist identification with stag women by ‘bad girl’ feminists of the 1980s,6 are idiosyncratic moments that seep almost by chance through the continuous fabric of male subjectivity. Aside from these chance flickers of documentary ‘truth’ in this paradoxical, primitive, and innocent art form that seeks cunt and, as I will show, discovers prick, what do we learn then, directly but mostly indirectly, of 6Such refreshing rereadings of vintage heteroerotica first surfaced in F.A.C.T. Book Committee, 1986. 5 men? The whole mosaic of underground erotic film and its spinoff genres does more than expose men's gazes and gestures, and even the occasional full-shot male body. It also exposes the spectrum of male sociality, the experience of having a penis (and being white)7 in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. For in front of and behind the camera, on the screen and in the screening room, this spectrum radiates in all its ambiguities and over-determinedness, however hermetic, abstract, individualized, and displaced the narratives are. A. Prick lives in packs. In the rest of this brief essay I would like to examine this spectrum of male homosociality that is the object, setting and vehicle of Mr. Prick's prolific and obsessive work. Or, I would like to lay bare, as John H. Gagnon and William Simon put it back in 1967 (the only social scientists to my knowledge to have studied the stags' subcultural milieu, no doubt aware that they were witnessing the swan song of the stag), the ‘primary referent of the films in this instance [which] is in the area of homosocial reinforcement of masculinity and hence only indirectly a reinforcement of heterosexual commitments’(Gagnon and Simon, 1973).8 7Nothing is apparently known about the circulation of stag movies within African-American circuits, the occasional black character in the corpus notwithstanding (approximately a dozen black men or women appear in American stag films seen by the author).

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